Visualizing comment sentiment

ABSTRACT

Certain aspects of the present disclosure provide techniques for displaying sentiment of a user text comment. One example method generally includes receiving a text comment comprising a sequence of words, providing a vector sequence representing the sequence of words to a sentiment model configured to output a sequence of sentiment scores for the vector sequence and providing cleaned text to a topic module configured to output relevance scores. The method further includes receiving, from the sentiment model, the sequence of sentiment scores for the vector sequence and receiving, from the topic module, the relevance scores for the cleaned text. The method further includes determining, final sentiment scores for each word of the sequence of words and generating a sentiment visualization for the sequence of words showing the final sentiment scores corresponding to each word of the sequence of words.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

This Application is a continuation of and hereby claims priority under35 U.S.C. § 120 to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 15/909,266, filed onMar. 1, 2018, now U.S. Pat. No. 10,789,429, the contents of which areincorporated herein in their entirety.

INTRODUCTION

Aspects of the present disclosure relate to using machine learningtechniques to analyze text comments.

Application providers frequently offer various feedback channels forusers to relay their experiences with applications. The user feedbackcan be used to develop and maintain the application. For example, acomment and review interface may be provided that allows users to ratetheir experience with the application and leave a comment explainingtheir rating. Comments may be received as text from an input device, asaudio, as an image or as other methods of input. The comments can beread by feedback agents (or developers) in order to determine issueswith the application. For example, if a feedback agent reads dozens ofcomments complaining of a particular issue, development or bug fixingteams may be alerted to the issue. However, for large applications witha large number of users, thousands of comments may be received on adaily basis, making human reading of all comments impractical. Manyapplication providers therefore employ automated processes to allow acomputing device to analyze comments.

However, existing systems for automating comment analysis have severaldrawbacks. First, comments, like speech, may convey more informationthan the bare identification of topics. For example, comments may conveya sentiment, whether negative or positive, about topics mentioned in thecomment. Further, existing methods that do perform sentiment analysismay prepare only a high-level sentiment analysis for an entire comment,which is ineffective for comments that mention multiple topics, bothpositively and negatively. For example, a comment could be sharplycritical of a first topic and highly praising of a second topic, whichmay be graded as neutral sentiment overall. Such a grading obfuscatesboth the negative sentiment of the first topic and the positivesentiment of the second topic.

Second, the information prepared by automatic comment analysis may besuitable only for an analyst with both the technical knowledge tounderstand the analysis system and the business knowledge to analyze thecomments themselves. For example, one who is inexperienced in suchanalysis may struggle to understand the output of the comment analysisautomation. Existing methods of automatic comment analysis do notprovide easy to understand output for non-technical experts. Existingmethods that do provide understanding aids such as a clustering ofkeywords or a word cloud of keywords, do not identify a topic associatedwith the keywords, making analysis of such aids time consuming as well.Further, such aids may make no distinction between relevant andirrelevant keyword associations, requiring analysis of keywords that arenot important to the analyst. Further still, existing methods provide noway of displaying a change in sentiment for a topic over time, helpingthe analyst to establish trends in the data.

Thus, systems and methods are needed to automate comment analysis thatcan perform word-by-word (or, in-sentence) analysis of the sentiment andtopic of comments and prepare this word-by-word data to be consumed bynon-experts.

BRIEF SUMMARY

Certain embodiments provide a method for displaying sentiment of a usertext comment. The method generally includes receiving a text commentcomprising a sequence of words, providing a vector sequence representingthe sequence of words to a sentiment model configured to output asequence of sentiment scores for the vector sequence and providingcleaned text to a topic module configured to output relevance scores.The method further includes receiving, from the sentiment model, thesequence of sentiment scores for the vector sequence and receiving, fromthe topic module, the relevance scores for the cleaned text. The methodfurther includes determining, final sentiment scores for each word ofthe sequence of words and generating a sentiment visualization for thesequence of words showing the final sentiment scores corresponding toeach word of the sequence of words.

Other embodiments include a computing device comprising a processor andmemory including instructions that cause the computing device to performthe method for displaying sentiment of a user text comment describedabove. Still other embodiments provide a computer readable mediumstoring instructions that can cause a computing device to perform themethod for displaying sentiment of a user text comment described above.

The following description and the related drawings set forth in detailcertain illustrative features of one or more embodiments.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

The appended figures depict certain aspects of the one or moreembodiments and are therefore not to be considered limiting of the scopeof this disclosure.

FIG. 1 is a conceptual diagram of a process of automating analysis of auser comment.

FIG. 2 depicts an example comment analysis system.

FIG. 3 depicts an example computing environment for training a sentimentmodel.

FIG. 4 is a conceptual diagram of the operation of a bidirectional longshort term memory model.

FIG. 5 depicts an example sentiment trend visualization.

FIG. 6 depicts example sentiment visualizations for user comments.

FIG. 7 is a flow diagram illustrating an example method for displayingsentiment of a user text comment.

FIG. 8 depicts an example comment analysis system for use in displayingsentiment of a user text comment.

To facilitate understanding, identical reference numerals have beenused, where possible, to designate identical elements that are common tothe drawings. It is contemplated that elements and features of oneembodiment may be beneficially incorporated in other embodiments withoutfurther recitation.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

The ability to effectively automate analysis of user comments relatingto a software application can lead to improved and more efficientdevelopment (or maintenance) of the software application. For example,by analyzing user comments, an analyst may be able to determine ifrecent changes to the application are leading to user dissatisfactionwith the software application (e.g., if a recent patch or update haschanged software functionality). Analysis of user comments may alsoallow an analyst to determine what issues (such as bugs, logic flaws orother programming errors) are hindering use of the software applicationfor users. Conversely, analysis of user comments may allow an analyst todetermine the strengths or high points of an application, which cansimilarly be used to direct development by identifying what aspects ofthe application are well-liked. For applications where many comments maybe received frequently, human analysis of all comments is notadvantageous or practical, so software providers tend to rely on variousautomatic systems to analyze user comments.

However, existing systems of automatic comment analysis may be limitedto identifying topics or concepts covered by a particular comment, whichdoes not cover other features, such as sentiment, that a human analystmay be able to readily determine. In existing systems, analysis of textsfor sentiment requires a separate sentiment analysis system from a topicanalysis system. The sentiment system typically requires unique inputand produces unique output (as compared to the topic analysis system).As discussed herein, by utilizing a system that produces separate (butrelated) input and maintains two analysis models, effective automationof analyzing text data, such as user comments, is possible.

In particular, the systems and methods disclosed herein relate tocomment analysis by way of a sentiment model and a topic module. Thecomment analysis method receives a text comment and prepares two inputsfor processing using various preprocessing and vectorization steps. Theprepared inputs are fed to the sentiment model and the topic module, andthe resulting outputs are matched to determine both the sentiment andthe topics covered by the text comment on a word-by-word basis. Existingautomatic comment analysis systems fail to perform sentiment analysisusing word-level granularity, and instead measure sentiment on asentence-by-sentence or comment-by-comment basis. Word-by-word analysisallows a single text to be analyzed for sentiment of more than onetopic. If only measured at sentence level, only a single sentiment canbe derived from a text.

Also discussed herein are methods for generating visualizations of textanalysis data, which allow non-experts to use comment analysis data todetermine trends in user comments about various parts of a softwareapplication. By use of such visualizations, non-experts may be able toeffectively direct development and management of the application inorder to improve application performance and user satisfaction with theapplication. This is an improvement over existing automatic commentanalysis systems, which typically produce output that may need to beinterpreted by an expert (e.g., a technician that designed the system ora frequent user of the system) in order for non-experts (e.g., managersor development leaders) to be able to use comment analysis data.

FIG. 1 is a conceptual diagram of a process 100 of automating analysisof a user comment. Process 100 starts with the receipt of user commentson a product, as shown at 110. As discussed above, analyzing thecomplete meaning of a user comment involves analysis of both thesentiment and the topics of the user comment. As a result, in process100, the analysis is broken into two paths. Sentiment is analyzed by thepath represented by 120 and 130, while topics are analyzed by the pathrepresented by 125 and 135.

At 120, the user comments received at 110 are passed to a deep learningsentiment model, for analysis of the sentiment displayed by the usercomments. The deep learning sentiment model is a bi-directional longshort term memory (Bi-LSTM) model. The operation of Bi-LSTM models aredescribed in further detail below with respect to FIG. 4. In general,the deep learning sentiment model, and associated components, generatevector representations of the text of the received user comments, and,as shown at 130, produce the sentiment of the user comments as output.The sentiment is produced on a word by word basis, in order to latercorrelate the sentiment of a particular word with the topic of theparticular word.

In parallel, the user comments are also passed to a machine learningtopic model at 125, for analysis of the topics mentioned in the usercomments. The operation of the machine learning model is described infurther detail below. In general, the machine learning topic modelperforms natural language processing on the text of the user comments,and then uses vector representations of the text after processing toidentify topics mentioned by the user comments. The machine learningtopic model, as shown at 135, produces these identified topics asoutput. Like the sentiment produced at 130, the topics are identified ona word by word basis.

At 140, the sentiment of the user comments and the topic of the usercomments are combined to determine how the sentiment has changed forvarious topics over time. Because both sentiment and topics aredetermined on a word by word basis, the respective sentiment and relatedtopic of a given word can be correlated to determine the sentiment ofparticular topics. The sentiment change may be limited to certainperiods of time, such as since a most recent update to the product.

At 150, using the sentiment change produced at 140, it may be possibleto determine the root cause of sentiment change overall, by examiningwhich topics have largest change in sentiment individually. In manycases, it may be difficult to determine the cause of a downturn in useropinion of a product. By analyzing both the sentiment and topics coveredby user comments on a word by word basis, it is possible to determinethe topics most responsible for any such changes. In turn, determiningthe topics most responsible may enable an examination of recent changesto those topics themselves, and allow a developer to correct anyproblems with those topics.

FIG. 2 depicts an example comment analysis system 200. Comment analysissystem 200 is used to perform methods described herein, such as a methodfor displaying sentiments of user text comments. In someimplementations, comment analysis system 200 may include a computingdevice comprising a processor, a memory, and a storage (not shown)comprising instructions that, when executed by the processor using thememory, perform, for example, the method for displaying sentiment ofuser text comments.

Comment analysis system 200 may be configured to receive feedback from,for example, a software application that includes a feedback system,which allows users of the application to post comments (as well asratings) of the software application. For example, the application mayask a user to provide a numeric rating between 1 and 10 and providecomments explaining why the user gave whatever rating when chosen.

Comment analysis system 200 may receive user comments from commentrepository 270 (and analyze the user comments to determine, for example,(1) topics covered by the user comments and (2) the sentiment of theuser comments. Comment analysis system 200 then uses the determinedtopics and sentiments to generate a weighted final sentiment score foreach of the user comments, and then generates a visualization of thesentiments based on the final sentiment scores associated with eachuser.

In this example, comment analysis system 200 includes topic analysispipeline 220, sentiment analysis pipeline 230, keyword taxonomy 240,score combiner 250, final sentiment scores 252, visualization module260, comment repository 270 and sentiment repository 280. Commentrepository 270 may be a storage device used to store comments 272 fromusers of one or more software applications. As shown, comment repository270 includes a plurality of comments 272, which in turn include text 274and ratings 276.

Comments received from users may include, for example, a message (e.g.,text 274) and a score rating the user's experience with the softwareapplication (e.g., ratings 276). The message may be formatted as textentered via an input device, such as a touchscreen or a keyboard of anelectronic device. The message may also be received as audio recorded bya microphone, and processed using natural language processing, todetermine a text representation of the audio. As yet another example,the message may also be formatted as an image containing text (e.g., animage of a paper document taken by a digital camera or scanned in via ascanner), and processed using optical character recognition (OCR) todetermine a text representation of the image.

In general, comment analysis system sends text 274 (shown as comment210) to both topic analysis pipeline 220 and sentiment analysis pipeline230, which thereafter analyze the sentiment and topic (or topics) oftext 274.

Ratings 276 along with text 274 can also be used to train sentimentmodel 234. As ratings 276 is a score representing the experience of theuser, it can be used as a label for a given text (e.g., a ground truthby which to train a sentiment-based machine learning model). Trainingbased on comments 272 is described further with respect to FIG. 3.

Topic analysis pipeline 220 includes natural language processing module222, topic module 224 and relevance scores 226.

Natural language processing module 222 is a software routine thatperforms various preprocessing tasks on the text of comment 210 (e.g.,“cleaning” the text). Such cleaning tasks include removing stop words,performing tokenization, performing stemming, removing non-Englishwords, removing punctuation or replacing hypertext markup language(HTML) syntax with English grammar. Natural language processing module222 produces “cleaned” texts (e.g., texts that have been preprocessed),which are then sent to topic module 224.

One cleaning process performed by natural language processing module 222is stop word removal. Stop words may be removed before vectorization inorder to improve processing time and efficiency, because they are commonwords that convey little meaning, but may complicate searching forphrases. Common stop words include prepositions and articles, such as“the,” “is,” “at,” “which” or “on”. Identifying stop words to remove canbe performed by utilizing a pre-defined list of English stop words.

Stemming is another cleaning process performed by natural languageprocessing module 222. Stemming is the process of reducing inflected (orsometimes derived) words to their word stem, base, or root form.Stemming algorithms such as Porter's Algorithm and others may be appliedduring stemming. Lemmatization is a more complex approach to determininga stem of a word that involves first determining the part of speech of aword, and applying different normalization rules for each part ofspeech. In lemmatization, the part of speech is first detected prior toattempting to find the root since for some languages, the stemming ruleschange depending on a word's part of speech. In some cases, stemming andlemmatization approaches may be used together in hybrid approaches.

A further cleaning process performed by natural language processingmodule 222 is tokenization. Tokenization is the process of converting asequence of characters (such as a word) into a token with an assignedmeaning. For example, the word “apple” may be associated with adictionary ID “123” whereas “orange” may be associated with a dictionaryID “241”. Some methods used to identify tokens in text include: regularexpressions, specific sequences of characters termed a flag, specificseparating characters called delimiters, and explicit definition by adictionary. Special non-alphabetical characters, including punctuationcharacters, are commonly used to identify tokens because of theirnatural use in written languages; however, tokenization may ultimatelyeliminate all the non-alphabetical symbols in the original text.

Other cleaning processes in addition to the processes mentioned abovemay be performed by natural language processing module 222. When thecleaning processes are complete, natural language processing module 222passes the cleaned text to topic module 224. In this example, topicmodule 224 is a software routine executing on comment analysis system200. Topic module 224 accepts cleaned text from natural languageprocessor 222, generates vector representations of the cleaned text, anddetermines relevance scores 226 for the produced vector representations.To generate the vector representations, topic module 224 may make use ofa vectorization tool such as word2vec.

To determine relevance scores 226 for the vector representations, topicmodule 224 uses keyword taxonomy 240. Keyword taxonomy 240 defines aplurality of topics covered by the software application analyzed bycomment analysis system 200. Keyword taxonomy 240 is a layered hierarchyof topics and keywords used to identify topics. Keyword taxonomy 240 maybe created by a user (e.g., a technician or operator of comment analysissystem 200) specifying a set of topics and a set of keywords (seedkeywords) corresponding to each topic of the set of topics. Then theuser may use a phrasing model to determine additional keywords to beadded to keyword taxonomy 240. In this example, the phrasing model makesuse of the seed keywords to identify related keywords (relevantkeywords) in the cleaned text based on the collocation frequency ofwords penalized by their document frequency. In some embodiments thephrasing model may be Gensim, an unsupervised semantic modeler. Keywordtaxonomy 240 is then the set of topics, with associated keywords (seedkeywords and relevant keywords).

If the software application an accounting application, possible topicsmay relate to a function of the software application (e.g., “log-in,”“printing,” “online version” etc.), an accounting topic (e.g.,“payroll,” “expenses,” etc.) or topics related to the user experience(e.g., “price increase”). Each of the topics are associated with a setof keywords. The keywords are a set of words known to be related to aparticular topic. For example, the topic “billing” may have keywordssuch as “bill” or “credit card.”

To determine relevance scores 226, topic module 224 plots the vectorrepresentations in a vector space. The vector space is initially createdby topic module 224 using keyword taxonomy 240. In general, topic module224 generates keyword vectors for the keywords of keyword taxonomy 240,and plots the keyword vectors in the vector space. When so plotted,topic module 224 identifies clusters within the vector space. Theseclusters correspond to the topics of keyword taxonomy 240 (e.g., thekeywords of a particular topic are clustered together). With theseidentified clusters, topic module 224 can plot a new vector (or set ofvectors) in the vector space and determine a similarity between the wordrepresented by the new vectors and the topic, by comparing the cosinesimilarity of the new vector to the existing clusters.

In this example, topic module 224 plots the vector representations ofthe cleaned text within the vector space. Then, topic module 224determines relevance scores 226 for the vector representations, whichshow a similarity between the vector representations and the topics. Forexample, if topic module 224 analyzes vectors for association with tentopics, topic module 224 outputs ten relevance scores for eachindividual vector of the vector representation.

In one example, the relevance is measured by first determining thecosine similarity of each vector representation of the cleaned text toeach of the keyword vectors. Then, an average cosine similarity for avector to all the keyword vectors of a cluster is determined. Thisaverage cosine similarity can be used as a relevance score (e.g.,between 0 and 1) for the topic associated with that cluster. When scoredbetween 0 and 1, 0 may indicate the vector is not relevant to thecluster associated with a topic and 1 may indicate the highest level ofrelevance between the vector and the cluster associated with the topic.

Relevance scores 226 also include an indication of which keyword is themost relevant to each vector, determined by locating the keyword vectorfor each topic with the highest cosine similarity to the vector. Forexample, a vector representing the word “bug” may have, for the topic“website version,” the highest cosine similarity with the keyword vectorrepresenting “error” of the keyword for “website version.”

Sentiment analysis pipeline 230 includes sentiment vectorizer 232,sentiment model 234, and sentiment scores 236. Sentiment vectorizer 232performs vectorization of the text of comment 210. In someimplementations, a tool such as Global Vectors (GloVe) can be used tocreate vectors representing individual words from text-based data.Sentiment vectorizer 232 produces a sequence of vectors representing thetext of comment 210.

Notably, the text of comment 210 is rendered into two different vectorsby comment analysis system 200-one for use within topic analysispipeline 220 and one for use within sentiment analysis pipeline 230.This is because each topic analysis pipeline 220 and sentiment analysispipeline have different considerations for how the vectors are prepared.

Consider the example text comment “Payroll is really broken!” The textused to generate vectors for sentiment analysis pipeline 230 istypically not cleaned prior to vectorization, so sentiment vectorizer232 generates five vectors: [Payroll], [is], [really], [broken], [!]. Bycontrast, to generate vectors for topic analysis pipeline 220, naturallanguage processor 222 performs cleaning tasks, such as stop wordremoval, punctuation removal and stemming. Stop word and punctuationremoval may reduce the above text to “Payroll broken” and stemming maychange “broken” to “broke” or “break.” Thus, after cleaning andvectorization, the text “Payroll is really broken!” may be representedas two vectors: [payroll], [break].

Removal of stop words and punctuation (e.g., “is,” “really” and “!”) mayimprove topic analysis, by reducing the total number of vectors toanalyze. Further, stemming may also improve topic analysis bysubstituting a more easily searchable word or phrase (e.g., “break” for“broken”). However, these changes may reduce the effectiveness ofsentiment analysis. In this example, “broken” may convey a more negativesentiment than “break.” Additionally, the modifier “really” and thepunctuation “!” increase this negative sentiment. Thus, the vectors[Payroll], [is], [really], [broken], [!] may be better suited toperforming sentiment analysis, while the vectors [payroll], [break] maybe better suited to performing topic analysis.

In the example of “Payroll is really broken!”, the vector sequencegenerated by sentiment vectorizer 232 is provided to sentiment model 234as input. In some embodiments, sentiment model 234 is a time-dependentdeep learning model, such as a Bi-LSTM model. Such models are wellsuited for use in analyzing the sentiment of a word, as they have highflexibility and interpretability. However, in other examples, sentimentmodel 234 may be another type of machine learning model.

In some cases, sentiment model 234 may be trained on a separatecomputing device. The training of sentiment model 234 is described ingreater detail below with respect to FIG. 3.

Sentiment model 234 accepts a sequence of vectors representing asentence as input and outputs sentiment scores 236 for the sequence ofvectors. In some examples, a sentiment score may be on a scale from −1to 1, with −1 being the most negative sentiment and 1 being the mostpositive sentiment. Sentiment model 234 analyzes the vector sequence andoutputs a sentiment score for each vector of the vector sequence, withthe sentiment score for each vector being dependent on the sentimentscores for vectors preceding the vector in the vector sequence. Becauseeach vector represents a word of the original text, each sentiment scorecan be said to correspond to a word of the text.

The vector sequence is analyzed by sentiment model 234 recursively,meaning that a vector sequence of length N can be analyzed as Nfragments. The first fragment is the first vector alone, the secondfragment is the first two vectors, the third fragment is the first threevectors, and so on, until the Nth fragment covers all N vectors. Becausethe fragment N contains all N vectors of the vector sequence, fragment Nis identical to the vector sequence itself.

By analyzing each of the fragments separately, sentiment model 234 isable to determine the sentiment of the text vector-by-vector(corresponding to word-by-word), where each vector is weighted by thevectors that precede the vector in sequence. Weighting is used as thesentiment of a sequence of words may be more meaningful than thesentiment of a single word alone. Additionally, weighting is used toaccount for words that modify the sentiment of nearby words but includelittle meaning alone. For example, the phrase “very unhappy” shouldproduce a lower sentiment score than the word “unhappy” alone, andsimilarly, the phrase “very happy” should produce a higher sentimentscore than the word “happy” alone.

As an example, consider the comment “Website is buggy and unreliable”which may be rendered as the vector sequence [website], [is], [buggy],[and], [unreliable]. When analyzed in sequence, sentiment model 234 mayproduce a sentiment score of 0 (neutral sentiment) for the first twofragments ([web site] and [web site], [is]), but a sentiment score of−0.3 for the third fragment due to the negative sentiment of the word“buggy.” The fourth fragment ([web site], [is], [buggy], [and]) may alsoreceive a sentiment score of −0.3 as “and” is a neutral sentiment wordthat does not modify the sentiment compared to the third fragment.However, the full sequence may be given a sentiment score of −0.6, whichaccounts for the additional negative sentiment of the word “unreliable”on top of the existing negative sentiment for the fourth fragment. Thesentiment scores of the fragments would therefore be, in sequence, {0,0, −0.3, −0.3, −0.6}. By correlating this sequence of sentiment scoresto the sequence of words of the text, visualization module 260 may beable to produce a visual guide showing a decrease in sentiment over thecourse of the comment.

Score combiner 250 is a software routine executing as part of commentanalysis system 200 used to generate final sentiment scores 252 forcomment 210. To generate final sentiment scores 252, score combiner 250matches sentiment scores 236 with relevance scores 226.

As discussed above, the input provided to sentiment model 234 and topicmodule 224 are not identical, so the two outputs may not correspond toeach other. As a result, score combiner 250 may use approximate stringmatching (e.g., fuzzy matching) to match sentiment scores 236 withkeywords associated with relevance scores 226. After matching sentimentscores 236 with relevance scores 226, score combiner 250 determinesfinal sentiment scores 252 associated with each topic for the text ofuser comment 210. Final sentiment scores indicate a relevance of comment210 to a topic, as well as a sentiment of comment 210 for that topic.

The sentiment of a final sentiment score may be based on a sentimentscore for a keyword, or a group of keywords, found to be related to thetopic. For example, the comment “The timesheet is clunky to use” mayhave a final sentiment score for the topic “payroll” with a relevance of1, a sentiment of −0.31 and may identify “timesheet” as a keyword. Thesame comment may have a final sentiment score for the topic “websiteissue” with a relevance of 0.7, a sentiment of −0.95 and may identify“clunky” as a keyword.

Visualization module 260 is software routing executing as part ofcomment analysis system 200 used to generate sentiment visualizations offinal sentiment scores 252, as produced by score combiner 250.

In one embodiment, sentiment visualizations may be color-coded bysentiment and show each topic relevant to the final sentiment scores. Anexample of sentiment visualizations are shown below with respect to FIG.6.

Sentiment repository 280 is used to store final sentiment scores forpreviously analyzed user comments. In some examples, visualizationmodule 260 may obtain a plurality of previous final sentiment scoresfrom sentiment repository 280 and use the plurality of previous finalsentiment scores to generate a sentiment trend. In general, thesentiment trend shows a change in sentiment (either negative orpositive) for a given topic over time. Comment analysis system 200 mayalso generate a sentiment trend visualization for display locally oncomment analysis system 200 or on a separate display device. An exampleof a sentiment trend visualization is shown below with respect to FIG.5A.

The use of comment analysis system 200 to determine sentimentvisualizations for topics may be used in the development and maintenanceof software applications. For example, low-sentiment topics may be usedby managers or administrators of the software application to drivedevelopment of the software application, such as by directing attentionor resources to the upkeep or improvement of topics are associated withlow sentiment scores. By so directing development and maintenance, theeventual user experience of the software application may also beimproved.

FIG. 3 depicts an example computing environment 300 for trainingsentiment model 234. Computing environment 300 includes comment analysissystem 200 and sentiment system 310. Sentiment system 310 may representa computing device including a processor, a memory and a storage (notshown). Sentiment system 310 is used to train sentiment model 234. Inthis example, sentiment system 310 includes training data 320,validation data 330, and sentiment model 234.

Training data 320 includes vectors 322 and labels 324. Vectors 322represent words in the text of comments (e.g., comments 272). In thisexample, texts 274 of comments 272 are obtained by sentiment system 310from comment repository 270, and are thereafter vectorized and stored asvectors 322. Likewise, labels 324 are ground-truth training labels andare obtained from ratings 276 associated with comments 272.

Sentiment system 310 uses training data 320 in order to train sentimentmodel 234. In general, vectors 322 are provided as input to sentimentmodel 234, which produces an estimated output based on vectors 322. Theestimated output is then compared to labels 324, and the difference (ifany) between the estimated output and labels 324 is used to adjustexecution parameters of sentiment model 234. This process may beperformed iteratively, and may be performed many times until theestimated output produced by sentiment model 234 exceeds an accuracythreshold, or until the improvement in the estimated output falls belowa threshold for iterative improvement.

After training, sentiment model 234 may be tested by using validationdata 330 to verify training is complete. Validation data 330 includesvectors 332 and labels 334, which also correspond, respectively, to text274 and ratings 276, but vectors 332 were not used in the training ofsentiment model 234.

When the training of sentiment model 234 is complete, sentiment system310 transfers sentiment model 234 to comment analysis system 200 forexecution. In other examples, sentiment model 234 may execute onsentiment system 310 or on a cloud computing or distributed computingsystem.

FIG. 4 is a conceptual diagram 400 of the operation of a bidirectionallong short term memory model. Diagram 400 includes four vectorrepresentations of words, 410, 420, 430 and 440, as well as eight LSTMcells 1-8 and four sentiment analyses 415, 425, 435 and 445, eachcorresponding to a vector representation. The four sentiment analyseshave two sections, a forwards analysis (shown as the bottom of eachsentiment analysis) and a backwards analysis (shown as the top of eachsentiment analysis). A Bi-LSTM consists of a number of LSTM cells, whicheach take one of the vector representations as input. Each LSTM cellalso pushes forward its output to the next LSTM in sequence. Because theBi-LSTM is bidirectional, it includes two series of LSTM cells, shown as450 and 455. The Bi-LSTM model in diagram 400 includes eight individualLSTM cells, four as the forward direction (450) and four as the backwarddirection (455). The exact number of LSTM cells in a Bi-LSTM model isarbitrary, however.

In operation, LSTM 1 of 450 takes vector 410 as input. LSTM 1 thenoutputs the sentiment analysis of vector 410 to both 415 and to LSTM 2.LSTM 2 takes the sentiment analysis of vector 410 as well as vector 420as input. Thus, the sentiment analysis of vector 420 takes into accountthe sentiment analysis of vector 410. LSTM 2 then outputs the sentimentanalysis of to both LSTM 3 and 425. This process continues for LSTM 3and LSTM 4, so that the sentiment analysis of vector 430 (shown as thebottom half of 435) includes the sentiment analysis of vectors 410 and420, and the sentiment analysis of vector 440 includes the sentimentanalysis of vectors 410, 420 and 430. For example, if vectors 410, 420,430 and 440 represent the words “payroll is really broken,” the forwardssentiment analysis at 415 is for “payroll,” the forwards sentimentanalysis at 425 is for “payroll is,” the forwards sentiment analysis at435 is for “payroll is really,” and the forwards sentiment analysis at445 is for “payroll is really broken.”

A similar process is performed by LSTM 5-8 for the backwards direction,resulting in both a forwards and backwards sentiment analysis for eachof the four vectors. Performing a backwards analysis may improve thesentiment analysis for some sentence structures, for example when themost significant word for sentiment purposes is the last word in asentence.

FIG. 5 depicts example sentiment trend visualization 500. As shown,sentiment trend visualization 500 is a box graph. In this example, thesize of each box reflects a relative frequency of comments about aparticular topic. In sentiment trend visualization 500, the largest boxis associated with the topic “price increase”, which indicates that forthe time period represented by sentiment trend visualization 500 (inthis case, the month of September) “price increase” was the mostfrequent topic in user comments.

In the example depicted in FIG. 5, different shading is used todifferentiate the boxes by sentiment. Boxes with lined shading (thetopics “price increase,” “desktop version,” “mobile version” and “onlineversion”) show negative sentiment for that topic, while unlined shading(the topics “simple use” and “small business”) show positive sentimentfor that topic. The darkness of the shading represents strength ofsentiment, either positive or negative. Thus, the darkly shaded box fortopic “small business” indicates a high positive sentiment for “smallbusiness,” while the darkly shaded box for “online version” indicates ahigh negative sentiment for “online version.” In this example shadingand lines are used to represent sentiment, but in other examples colorcoding, font type and formatting, and other visual indications may beused to represent sentiment. For example, shades of green may be used torepresent positive sentiment and shades of red may be used to representnegative sentiment.

A sentiment trend visualization displays at least the relative (e.g.,high or low) sentiment for topics that have occurred frequently incomments over the time period shown by the sentiment trendvisualization.

For example, consider a system that evaluates twenty topics, andproduces sentiment trend visualizations for a month prior to thegeneration date of the sentiment trend visualization. In such a system,the top ten topics in volume for the past month may be shown as aseparate box while the bottom ten topics in volume may be shown as acombined box. In general, a threshold may be applied to show only acertain number of topics of the total topics or a certain number oftopics of the total volume (e.g., the topics making up the top fiftypercent of recent comments).

Sentiment trend visualization 500 is a box graph, but in other examplessentiment trend visualizations may be other types of graphs or visualaids. For example, sentiment trend visualization may be a radar chartwhere each wedge of the radar chart represents a topic of the pluralityof topics and the width of each wedge represents a volume of the topicof the comments received during the month. Like the box graph, the colorof each wedge represents the type (e.g., positive or negative) ofsentiment for the topic, but unlike the box graph the strength of thesentiment may be shown by the radius of each wedge.

Sentiment trend visualization 500 may be generated by a visualizationmodule, such as visualization module 260 of FIG. 2. Sentiment trendvisualization 500 may be displayed on a display device connected to thecomputing device executing the visualization module, or may betransmitted to a separate display device.

FIG. 6 depicts example sentiment visualizations 615, 625 and 635, forthree user comments. Sentiment visualization 615 is for the text of theuser comment “the customer support is awesome and its easy to use.”Sentiment visualization 615 includes two charted lines, the solid linefor sentiment score (scaled from −1 to 1 as shown at the right) and thedotted line for P raw review score, scaled from 0 to 10. P raw reviewscore represents the expected review score for the comment based on theanalysis up to and including the current word. In this example, thewords “is the customer support is” are neither very positive nor verynegative, so the points for those words are in the middle of the linecharts. The word “awesome,” however, is positive, so the point for“awesome” is higher on the line charts. In general, upward motion in thelines indicates a positive sentiment word and downward motion in theliens indicates a negative sentiment word.

Color chart 610 is a separate indication of the sentiment of the text.Following the pattern used in FIG. 5, darker shades indicate highermagnitude sentiment, and line shading indicates negative sentiment. Aswith FIG. 5, in other examples color coding may instead be used torepresent positive and negative sentiment.

Sentiment visualization 625 shows the text of the user comment “onlineis very buggy and painful to use I liked desktop but added people socouldn't continue”, and color chart 620 shows the high and low points ofsentiment for the comment. The lowest sentiment words can be measured byhighest negative gradient between points. In this example, “buggy” and“painful” result in the most steep (highest gradient) between two wordsin the comment, and are thus the lowest sentiment words of the comment.

Sentiment visualization 635 shows the text of the user comment “ihaven't been able to update on my banking stuff in days !!”, and colorchart 630 shows the high and low points of sentiment for the comment.Sentiment visualization 635 shows a generally neutral but slightlynegative sentiment comment. The most negative word of the comment is“update.” “Update” can in some cases be a positive sentiment word, butin the context of the preceding phrase “haven't been able to” it isrecognized as a negative sentiment word.

A sentiment visualization may show at least the strength and type ofsentiment for each word of a text comment. In this example, sentimentvisualization 615, 625 and 635 show positive, neutral or negativesentiment for each word of the text. A sentiment visualization can beuseful for showing the relative sentiment of words in a comment, andwhich words of the comment cause the sentiment for the comment to beoverall negative or overall positive.

FIG. 7 is a flow diagram illustrating an example method 700 fordisplaying sentiment of a user text comment. Method 700 may be performedby a comment analysis system, such as comment analysis system 200 ofFIG. 2.

Method 700 begins at 710 where the comment analysis system obtains atext comment comprising a sequence of words. As discussed above, thecomment analysis system may be associated with a software application,and the text comment may be obtained from a comment repository thatstores user comments related to the software application. The commentsmay be initially received in a variety of formats (such as text oraudio) but the comment analysis system typically obtains the commentsfrom the comment repository as the sequence of words.

At 720, the comment analysis system provides a vector sequencerepresenting each of the sequence of words to a sentiment modelconfigured to output a sequence of sentiment score for the vectorsequence. As discussed above, the vector sequence is typically notpreprocessed before vectorization in order to preserve sentimentexpressed by the sequence of words.

At 730, the comment analysis system provides cleaned text to a topicmodule configured to output relevance scores associated with each topicof a plurality of topics for vector representations of the cleaned text.The cleaned text, is preprocessed before vectorization. Suchpreprocessing allows for more efficient searching for relevance ofvector representations of the cleaned text.

At 740, the comment analysis system receives, from the sentiment model,the sentiment scores for the vector sequence and also receives, from thetopic module, the relevance scores for the cleaned text. The sentimentscores indicate the sentiment of the vector sequence (and thus thesequence of words underlying the vector sequence), and the relevancescores indicate the association between the sequence of words and a setof topics.

At 750, the comment analysis system determines, based on the sentimentscore scores for the vector sequence combined with the relevance scoresfor the cleaned text, final sentiment scores for each of the sequencesof words. Final sentiment scores indicate a sentiment associated witheach topic for each word. As discussed above, to determine finalsentiment scores the comment analysis system may use string matching(such as fuzzy matching) to associate sentiment scores (based onnon-processed text) with relevance scores (based on pre-processed text).After associating the scores the comment analysis system may determine,using various mathematical computations, the final sentiment scores.

At 760, the comment analysis system generates, based on the finalsentiment scores, a sentiment visualization for the sequence of wordsshowing the final sentiment scores corresponding to each word of thesequence words. The sentiment visualization is a visual display of theinformation represented by the final sentiment scores. As discussedabove, the sentiment visualization displays at least the relativesentiment of each word of the sequence of words.

In some embodiments, method 700 also includes 770, where the commentanalysis system receives a plurality of previous final sentiment scoresfrom a sentiment repository. The sentiment repository may be an externaldevice connected to the comment analysis system or may be a storagedevice within the comment analysis system. In general, the commentanalysis system generates final sentiment scores for user comments andstores them in the sentiment repository.

In some embodiments, method 700 also includes 780, where the commentanalysis system generates, based on the final sentiment scores and theplurality of previous final sentiment scores, a sentiment trend for eachtopic of the plurality of topics showing a change in sentiment over timefor each topic of the plurality of topics. Over time, enough finalsentiment scores may be generated and stored to determine trends in thefinal sentiment scores.

In some cases, method 700 further includes the comment analysis systemgenerating a trend visualization for each topic of the plurality oftopics based on the sentiment trend for each topic. As discussed above,a sentiment trend visualization displays at least the relative sentimentfor topics that have had high volume in comments for a given timeperiod.

In some embodiments of method 700 prior to being provided the cleanedtext, the topic module plots vector representations of a plurality ofkeywords associated with the plurality of topics. In still otherembodiments of method 700, the topic module determines the relevancescores by determining a cosine similarity between vector representationsof the cleaned text and the vector representations of the plurality ofkeywords.

The sentiment score for the each vector of the vector sequence isweighted based on sentiment scores for preceding vectors in the vectorsequence in some examples of method 700.

In some embodiments of method 700, the sentiment model is atime-dependent deep learning model trained using user comments labeledwith comment ratings.

In certain examples of method 700, the sentiment visualization is a boxgraph color coded by topic. In other examples, the sentimentvisualization is a radar chart for a given month, wherein each wedge ofthe radar chart represents a topic of the plurality of topics, a widthof each wedge represents a volume of the topic and a radius and color ofeach wedge represents a strength of sentiment for the topic.

FIG. 8 depicts an example comment analysis system 800 for use indisplaying sentiment of a user text comment. As shown, the commentanalysis system 800 includes, without limitation, a central processingunit (CPU) 802, one or more input/output (I/O) device interfaces 804,which may allow for the connection of various I/O devices 814 (e.g.,keyboards, displays, mouse devices, pen input, etc.) to comment analysissystem 800, network interface 806, memory 808, storage 810, and aninterconnect 812.

The CPU 802 may retrieve and execute programming instructions stored inthe memory 808. Similarly, the CPU 802 may retrieve and storeapplication data residing in the memory 808. The interconnect 812transmits programming instructions and application data, among the CPU802, I/O device interface 804, network interface 806, memory 808, andstorage 810. The CPU 802 is included to be representative of a singleCPU, multiple CPUs, a single CPU having multiple processing cores, andthe like. The I/O device interface 804 may provide an interface forcapturing data from one or more input devices integrated into orconnected to the comment analysis system 800, such as keyboards, mice,touchscreens, and so on. The memory 808 may represent a random accessmemory (RAM), while the storage 810 may be a solid state drive, forexample. Although shown as a single unit, the storage 810 may be acombination of fixed and/or removable storage devices, such as fixeddrives, removable memory cards, network attached storage (NAS), orcloud-based storage.

As shown, the memory 808 includes sentiment model 821, topic module 822,score combiner 823 and visualization module 824, which are softwareroutines executed based on instructions stored in the storage 810. Suchinstructions may be executed by the CPU 802.

As shown, the storage 810 includes user comment 831, relevance scores832, sentiment scores 833 and final sentiment scores 834. User comment831 may be obtained from a comment repository and used to generate inputfor sentiment model 821 and topic module 822. Sentiment model 821outputs sentiment scores 833 and topic module 822 outputs relevancescores 832. Score combiner 823 combines sentiment scores 833 andrelevance scores 832 to determine final sentiment scores 834.Visualization module 824 then generates a sentiment visualization basedon final sentiment scores 834.

The preceding description is provided to enable any person skilled inthe art to practice the various embodiments described herein. Theexamples discussed herein are not limiting of the scope, applicability,or embodiments set forth in the claims. Various modifications to theseembodiments will be readily apparent to those skilled in the art, andthe generic principles defined herein may be applied to otherembodiments. For example, changes may be made in the function andarrangement of elements discussed without departing from the scope ofthe disclosure. Various examples may omit, substitute, or add variousprocedures or components as appropriate. For instance, the methodsdescribed may be performed in an order different from that described,and various steps may be added, omitted, or combined. Also, featuresdescribed with respect to some examples may be combined in some otherexamples. For example, an apparatus may be implemented or a method maybe practiced using any number of the aspects set forth herein. Inaddition, the scope of the disclosure is intended to cover such anapparatus or method that is practiced using other structure,functionality, or structure and functionality in addition to, or otherthan, the various aspects of the disclosure set forth herein. It shouldbe understood that any aspect of the disclosure disclosed herein may beembodied by one or more elements of a claim.

As used herein, the term “determining” encompasses a wide variety ofactions. For example, “determining” may include calculating, computing,processing, deriving, investigating, looking up (e.g., looking up in atable, a database or another data structure), ascertaining and the like.Also, “determining” may include receiving (e.g., receiving information),accessing (e.g., accessing data in a memory) and the like. Also,“determining” may include resolving, selecting, choosing, establishingand the like.

The methods disclosed herein comprise one or more steps or actions forachieving the methods. The method steps and/or actions may beinterchanged with one another without departing from the scope of theclaims. In other words, unless a specific order of steps or actions isspecified, the order and/or use of specific steps and/or actions may bemodified without departing from the scope of the claims. Further, thevarious operations of methods described above may be performed by anysuitable means capable of performing the corresponding functions. Themeans may include various hardware and/or software component(s) and/ormodule(s), including, but not limited to a circuit, an applicationspecific integrated circuit (ASIC), or processor. Generally, where thereare operations illustrated in figures, those operations may havecorresponding counterpart means-plus-function components with similarnumbering.

The various illustrative logical blocks, modules and circuits describedin connection with the present disclosure may be implemented orperformed with a general purpose processor, a digital signal processor(DSP), an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), a fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) or other programmable logic device (PLD),discrete gate or transistor logic, discrete hardware components, or anycombination thereof designed to perform the functions described herein.A general-purpose processor may be a microprocessor, but in thealternative, the processor may be any commercially available processor,controller, microcontroller, or state machine. A processor may also beimplemented as a combination of computing devices, e.g., a combinationof a DSP and a microprocessor, a plurality of microprocessors, one ormore microprocessors in conjunction with a DSP core, or any other suchconfiguration.

A processing system may be implemented with a bus architecture. The busmay include any number of interconnecting buses and bridges depending onthe specific application of the processing system and the overall designconstraints. The bus may link together various circuits including aprocessor, machine-readable media, and input/output devices, amongothers. A user interface (e.g., keypad, display, mouse, joystick, etc.)may also be connected to the bus. The bus may also link various othercircuits such as timing sources, peripherals, voltage regulators, powermanagement circuits, and other circuit elements that are well known inthe art, and therefore, will not be described any further. The processormay be implemented with one or more general-purpose and/orspecial-purpose processors. Examples include microprocessors,microcontrollers, DSP processors, and other circuitry that can executesoftware. Those skilled in the art will recognize how best to implementthe described functionality for the processing system depending on theparticular application and the overall design constraints imposed on theoverall system.

If implemented in software, the functions may be stored or transmittedover as one or more instructions or code on a computer-readable medium.Software shall be construed broadly to mean instructions, data, or anycombination thereof, whether referred to as software, firmware,middleware, microcode, hardware description language, or otherwise.Computer-readable media include both computer storage media andcommunication media, such as any medium that facilitates transfer of acomputer program from one place to another. The processor may beresponsible for managing the bus and general processing, including theexecution of software modules stored on the computer-readable storagemedia. A computer-readable storage medium may be coupled to a processorsuch that the processor can read information from, and write informationto, the storage medium. In the alternative, the storage medium may beintegral to the processor. By way of example, the computer-readablemedia may include a transmission line, a carrier wave modulated by data,and/or a computer readable storage medium with instructions storedthereon separate from the wireless node, all of which may be accessed bythe processor through the bus interface. Alternatively, or in addition,the computer-readable media, or any portion thereof, may be integratedinto the processor, such as the case may be with cache and/or generalregister files. Examples of machine-readable storage media may include,by way of example, RAM (Random Access Memory), flash memory, ROM (ReadOnly Memory), PROM (Programmable Read-Only Memory), EPROM (ErasableProgrammable Read-Only Memory), EEPROM (Electrically ErasableProgrammable Read-Only Memory), registers, magnetic disks, opticaldisks, hard drives, or any other suitable storage medium, or anycombination thereof. The machine-readable media may be embodied in acomputer-program product.

A software module may comprise a single instruction, or manyinstructions, and may be distributed over several different codesegments, among different programs, and across multiple storage media.The computer-readable media may comprise a number of software modules.The software modules include instructions that, when executed by anapparatus such as a processor, cause the processing system to performvarious functions. The software modules may include a transmissionmodule and a receiving module. Each software module may reside in asingle storage device or be distributed across multiple storage devices.By way of example, a software module may be loaded into RAM from a harddrive when a triggering event occurs. During execution of the softwaremodule, the processor may load some of the instructions into cache toincrease access speed. One or more cache lines may then be loaded into ageneral register file for execution by the processor. When referring tothe functionality of a software module, it will be understood that suchfunctionality is implemented by the processor when executinginstructions from that software module.

The following claims are not intended to be limited to the embodimentsshown herein, but are to be accorded the full scope consistent with thelanguage of the claims. Within a claim, reference to an element in thesingular is not intended to mean “one and only one” unless specificallyso stated, but rather “one or more.” Unless specifically statedotherwise, the term “some” refers to one or more. No claim element is tobe construed under the provisions of 75 U.S.C. § 112(f) unless theelement is expressly recited using the phrase “means for” or, in thecase of a method claim, the element is recited using the phrase “stepfor.” All structural and functional equivalents to the elements of thevarious aspects described throughout this disclosure that are known orlater come to be known to those of ordinary skill in the art areexpressly incorporated herein by reference and are intended to beencompassed by the claims. Moreover, nothing disclosed herein isintended to be dedicated to the public regardless of whether suchdisclosure is explicitly recited in the claims.

What is claimed is:
 1. A method for displaying sentiment of a user textcomment, comprising: receiving a text comment; providing a vectorsequence representing the text comment to a sentiment model configuredto output a sequence of sentiment scores for the vector sequence;receiving, from the sentiment model, the sequence of sentiment scoresfor the vector sequence; determining cleaned text front the textcomment; providing the cleaned text to a topic module configured todetermine relevance scores between the cleaned text and each topic of aplurality of topics and output the relevance scores; receiving, from thetopic module, the relevance scores for the cleaned text; determining,based on the sequence of sentiment scores for the vector sequence andthe relevance scores for the cleaned text, final sentiment scoresrelated to the text comment; and generating, based on the finalsentiment scores, a sentiment visualization for the text comment.
 2. Themethod of claim 1, further comprising: receiving a plurality of previousfinal sentiment scores from a sentiment repository; and generating,based on the final sentiment scores and the plurality of previous finalsentiment scores, a sentiment trend for each topic of the plurality oftopics showing a change in sentiment over time for each topic of theplurality of topics.
 3. The method of claim 2, further comprisinggenerating a trend visualization for each topic of the plurality oftopics based on the sentiment trend for each topic.
 4. The method ofclaim 3, wherein the trend visualization is a box graph color coded bytopic.
 5. The method of claim 3, wherein the trend visualization is aradar chart for a given month, wherein each wedge of the radar chartrepresents a topic of the plurality of topics, a width of each wedgerepresents a volume of the topic and a radius, and color of each wedgerepresents a strength of sentiment for the topic.
 6. The method of claim1, wherein, prior to being provided the cleaned text, the topic moduleplots vector representations of a plurality of keywords associated withthe plurality of topics.
 7. The method of claim 6, wherein the topicmodule determines the relevance scores by determining a cosinesimilarity between vector representations of the cleaned text and thevector representations of the plurality of keywords.
 8. The method ofclaim 1, wherein a sentiment score for each vector of the vectorsequence are weighted based on sentiment scores for preceding vectors inthe vector sequence.
 9. A computing device, comprising: a processor; anda memory including computer readable instructions, which, when executedby the processor, cause the computing device to perform a method fordisplaying sentiment of a user text comment, the method comprising:receiving a text comment; providing a vector sequence representing thetext comment to a sentiment model configured to output a sequence ofsentiment scores for the vector sequence; receiving, from the sentimentmodel, the sequence of sentiment scores for the vector sequence;determining cleaned text from the text comment, providing the cleanedtext to a topic module configured to determine relevance scores betweenthe cleaned text and each topic of a plurality of topics and output therelevance scores; receiving, from the topic module, the relevance scoresfor the cleaned text; determining, based on the sequence of sentimentscores for the vector sequence and the relevance scores for the cleanedtext, final sentiment scores related to the text comment; andgenerating, based on the final sentiment scores, a sentimentvisualization for the text comment.
 10. The computing device of claim 9,the method further comprising: receiving a plurality of previous finalsentiment scores from a sentiment repository; and generating, based onthe final sentiment scores and the plurality of previous final sentimentscores, a sentiment trend for each topic of the plurality of topicsshowing a change in sentiment over time for each topic of the pluralityof topics.
 11. The computing device of claim 10, the method, furthercomprising generating a trend visualization for each topic of theplurality of topics based on the sentiment trend for each topic.
 12. Thecomputing device of claim 11, wherein the trend visualization is a boxgraph color coded by topic.
 13. The computing device of claim 11,wherein the trend visualization is a radar chart for a given month,wherein each wedge of the radar chart represents a topic of theplurality of topics, a width of each wedge represents a volume of thetopic and a radius, and color of each wedge represents a strength ofsentiment for the topic.
 14. The computing device of claim 9, wherein,prior to being provided the cleaned text, the topic module plots vectorrepresentations of a plurality of keywords associated with the pluralityof topics.
 15. The computing device of claim 14, wherein the topicmodule determines the relevance scores by determining a cosinesimilarity between vector representations of the cleaned text and thevector representations of the plurality of keywords.
 16. The computingdevice of claim 9, wherein a sentiment score for each vector of thevector sequence are weighted based on sentiment scores for precedingvectors in the vector sequence.
 17. A method for displaying sentiment ofa user text comment, comprising: receiving a text comment; providing avector sequence representing the text comment to a sentiment modelconfigured to output a sequence of sentiment scores for the vectorsequence; receiving, from the sentiment model, the sequence of sentimentscores for the vector sequence; determining cleaned text from the textcomment; providing the cleaned text to a topic module configured todetermine relevance scores between the cleaned text and each topic of aplurality of topics and output the relevance scores; receiving, from thetopic module, the relevance scores for the cleaned text; determining,based on the sequence of sentiment scores for the vector sequence andthe relevance scores for the cleaned text, final sentiment scoresrelated to the text comment, wherein the final sentiment scores indicatea respective sentiment associated with each respective topic of theplurality of topics for each word of a sequence of words in the cleanedtext; and generating, based on the final sentiment scores, a sentimentvisualization for the text comment.
 18. The method of claim 17, furthercomprising: receiving a plurality of previous final sentiment scoresfrom a sentiment repository; and generating, based on the finalsentiment scores and the plurality of previous final sentiment; scores,a sentiment trend for each topic of the plurality of topics showing achange in sentiment over time for each topic of the plurality of topics.19. The method of claim 18, further comprising generating a trendvisualization for each topic of the plurality of topics based on thesentiment trend for each topic.
 20. The method of claim 19, wherein thetrend visualization is a box graph color coded by topic.